The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is an industry group working to improve world-wide wireless communication. Its Long Term Evolution (LTE) project is looking to set standards and guidelines to improve wireless communication systems in the near and long-term future. In order to further improve MBMS as an efficient mechanism to reliably distribute multimedia content over E-UTRA networks to subscribers, dedicated MBMS cells are considered in the 3GPP LTE standardization effort. Dedicated MBMS cells are those cells in which only MBMS is supported in the downlink. No uplink unicast services are supported in a dedicated MBMS cell.
Although MBMS architecture is generally supported in the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) release 6, dedicated MBMS cells are not supported. It would be desirable to have a method and apparatus to support WTRU operation for an MBMS dedicated cell that is compliant with UMTS release 6.